First few days in August...
Sunday, August 1, 2010: Got up a little before 7:00 AM to wonderfully cool temperatures; we're having such a mild summer! Shhh! Don't jinx it! Paid my Gieco bill for the month, sent $50 to Monica via BofA, and transferred some funds over so I could take Marty out to dinner this afternoon. I also called the Waltz Law Firm again, and asked them to call me back about pursuing a suit against Gus. Otherwise, I'm done with my "chores" for the day, and can pretty much do what I want. Woo-hoo!
Lovely, I get to listen the neighbors swear AND hack up crap from their lungs this morning... Eew!
Marty worked on the Nona house for several hours, and got back around 3:00 PM. He said he'd been washing the smoke and tar stains off the walls and ceiling in the hallway, and he still has two walls to finish. Talk about "eew"! Just before he came home, I was watching the movie about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (the woman with the unibrow and mustache)... I don't really like her style of painting, but she DID paint with a lot of emotion and put all of her pain right out there on canvas for everyone to see; so I felt she was "brave" in her way. Anyway, I asked Marty where he wanted to go for his birthday supper , and he said he wanted to go to the Tower Restaurant downtown, so we went there. And, lo and behold, the place featured a lot of Frida images and artwork! Weird, huh?!
CLICK HERE TO SEE PHOTOS
The restaurant is in the bottom floor of the old landmark "Tower" building, where there's also a theatre and a smoke shop. There's an outside garden/eating area with lots of big fountains and misters spewing cool "rain", and a main dining area as well as two smaller dining areas indoors. We got there just as the shifts were changing between lunch and dinner, so there weren't a lot of customers yet, and we got seated inside right away. The place is an eclectic mix of Asian, Egyptian, and South American art and artifacts (as well as a few oddities like griffins thrown in here and there), and the menu sort of mirrored that, with Mexican, Asian, and Panamerican dishes prepared with a new world flair. Marty had a flank steak served with deep fried ions and huge chunks of steamed veggies, and I had tempura fried fish on a bed of spinach with tamarin sauce and jasmine rice. YUMMY! The portions were generous, and everything was served hot and very tasty. Marty also had a sangria to dirnk, and I had a spiked lemonade (with a layer of cherry syrup at bottom of the glass, so you could suck in the lemony stuff, then stick the straw down into the syrup to get a sweet taste on top of it.) Oh, and we both had black bean soup before our entres came; it was spicey-hot and so, so good.
For dessert Marty had New York Cheesecake and I had a blueberry macaroon tart (which would have been better if it hadn't been so "dry"; I like my macaroons more moist than that.) Fun time, and not too expensive. We'll have to go there again sometime! The only "bad" thing was: Our waitress left us before our food was delivered -- she wnet ona break -- and didn't get back until AFTER we had ordered dessert.... so she got a "less than nothing" kind of tip... When I got home, I did some journaling, photo processing and finished up my laundry. All set for the rest of the week..
Monday, August 2, 2010: Back to school today. I was up until about 11:30 pm crying. For some reason I started thinking about the dogs Tigerlily and Mrs. Paroo... the ones Animal Control allowed to be MAULED to death... and got to crying and couldn't stop for hours and hours... So I fell asleep crying, and then woke up about 6:30 this morning with an emotional-hangover. I hate those. Went to college, and then did a little grocery shopping. When i got back home, I stoked up the grille and cooked up mega-hamburgers with cross-cut fries for supper. The burgers were so big, I could hardly get my mouth around one of them. (Marty ate two! Wow!) Then I watched a move, and after that was tired, so I was in bed by about 7:30 PM.
School Stuff: Anyway, it was back to classes this morning, and I was so far ahead in my Word 2007 class that I actually worked on a practice test during class. Only got 1 quesiton wrong, and then figured out how to fix it, so I should ace the "real" test when it comes up.
In Family Law class, we had a lecture, and then participated in a contest. My team won the first part of the contest -- go us! -- and then we had a show-down to see which single student was left standing after several rounds of Family Law Q and A. It got down to one guy (Will) and me, and I got the last question wrong... Well, actually, I think I found a loophole in the answer so I'm going to write it up and submit it to the teacher as a kind of "extra credit". We were all supposed to get prizes for our winnings, but the teacher was broke, so she said she'd have them for us on Wednesday. Hah!
DVD Stuff: I watched "The Bounty Hunter" with Gerard Butler and Jennifer Anniston ONLY because Butler was in it, and I think he's super sexy. The movie sucked eggs, though. It was a "comedy" that had ONE laugh in it, and it wasn't a very big one. Anniston goes to a private golf club and tries to weedle her way in by claiming she used to be a supermodel. The attendee woman looks at her and scowls, "Really? How long ago was that?!" (Small laugh.) Butler played an ex-cop turned bounty hunter, and was bedraggled and a little pudgy... so he wasn't as much of an eyeful as he normally is. AND he was using an affected New Jersey accent rather than his natural Irish one, so that was disappointing. What a waste of time. BTW, I can't stand Aniston. Is she going to play "Rachel Greene" (from "Friends") for the rest of her frigging life?! Ooogh! Get some talent!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010: I only had one class today at college, but went in early anyway to print out some stuff on the Arizona v. Gant case that I'll need for my Criminal Law class project, and to contact Technical Suport on Westlaw.com to see if they could get my school account with them reprogrammed for my simplymare e-mail adress (it took a few minutes, but they got it). I also did some work in my on-line Algebra class -- which isn't nearly as tough as I thought it might be... My in-school class today was Criminal Law and I just love. Today we went over some of the Amendments of the Constitution, and rehashed what constitutes a "crime" in the US (as opposed to a civil thing). I'm still totally convinced that the search of my home and seizure of my pets by Animal Control was COMPLETELY illegal and unconstitutional... As soon as the dog issue is settled in court this month, I'm going to soooooooo sue that f-ing county!!!